Axel Foley bluffs his way thru town

BEVERLY HILLS COP (1984)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"Beverly Hills Cop" is a highly entertaining, derivative and messy picture - it is an action comedy but the emphasis on the action at certain points negates the comic potential. Eddie Murphy, however, steals the movie easily and shows his talent far outweighs the average cop picture, playing the Detroit cop Axel Foley who bends the rules to his advantage.

Axel Foley (Murphy) had failed to bust an illegal cigarette-selling business in an opening chase scene that sets the pace of the rest of the movie. Axel's old friend and ex-partner in crime (James Russo) comes to town, hiding from a nefarious businessman who is in the bearer bonds and cocaine business. The crux of the movie is Axel's need to apprehend the killers with the help of the Beverly Hills police department. He does not play by the rules but the BH boys do. This causes a conflict of interests but I think you can see where the film is going. It is an action comedy in the strictest sense of the word, but somehow very uneven. The comedy does not flow easily or smoothly with the action scenes, especially the final shootout that seems to come from a different movie entirely. There is some humor there with the bumbling Rosewood and Taggart team but a bloody climax undermines the comedy and goes too far. Ever since I first saw the film in 1984, I felt the ending was crude and unnecessary.

But that is the problem. Is this a comedy or an action picture? Roger Ebert famously declared the fusion of the two genres as suspect and unworkable. The screenplay by Daniel Petrie (which was shockingly nominated for an Oscar) is at its best when we see Eddie at its center, acting drunk and foolish to nail a suspected robber at a nightclub or, in general, bluffing his way out of any Beverly Hills establishment and showing the rich, glamorous denizens of the ritzy town who is the boss. That is what I remember best about "Beverly Hills Cop." The lazily written, mediocre cops and cocaine dealers stuff is something you would see in any "Starsky and Hutch" show (Steven Berkoff is hardly a one-dimensional villain and performs ably and above the mediocrity). Had the film focused on Eddie's attempts to mingle and bluff his way through Beverly Hills and completely ditched the screenplay, then it might have been a real winner.

Martin Brest directs as well as he can, but he later proved to make a more amiable and entertaining action-comedy in the classic "Midnight Run" four years later. "Beverly Hills Cop" was a solid start for Eddie Murphy and it showed his comedic talent skillfully. I just sense that it could have been so much more.